PEACE A MOMENT

PEACE A MOMENT

Peace a moment. A bubble of cool bliss

in the skin of a tear. Grace, with a green thorn.

The moon as I’ve never seen it before.

A ghost in the willows feathers down

upon the dark waters of the Tay

in an aura of moist summer air,

indelible as chalk on a blackboard

as if it were trying to write its name.

Solitude’s a priestess leashed to a water snake

that meditates on the moonlight

like a theta wave on its own path through life.

Look where you will, even the search parties

you organize like poems with real candlepower

are still lost in the labyrinth of your homelessness

looking for your true address until

you realize it’s been under your feet all the time.

You are the road. And there’s no one on it.

The shadows of the trees lie down

like thresholds that sense someone’s

been crying in a derelict doorway for years.

Severe sorrow. A bell for a bucket

bailing out the empty lifeboat of the moon

long, long after it’s set. Love. No help for it.

White sweet clover, swan’s plumage,

both sides of the road. The wind

in the vocal cords of the wild grape vines

overgrowing the half closed gate

of someone who meant to return one day

like a loose page of a book to its binding.

An unfinished loveletter to the fire that wrote it.

The maples reach out to touch me

to see if I’m real. Nocturnal enough,

but who’s to judge? The dream

doesn’t have a dawn or dusk. The end

goes on forever. The beginning never happens.

Born into perishing my way through life

what could death mean but another night

of living my passage through it

as the juniper sweeps my tracks

from the trails I cut down to the river

like deer paths, and the stars

in the shrine of my eyes devote their candles

to the same darkness that inspires the fireflies,

or my insights into the nature of love

as the way the nightsky is transfixed

by what is born of it like the mystery

of why life shines on its own likeness

without going blind or turning into stone

as if imagination were the first sign,

black walnut trees losing their voice

like Lyra in the west, as above, so below,

autumn approaching, o, yes, the autumn

and the poignancy, almost the flavour

of creation, that what we love last

and the deepest, is the perennial beauty

of our own passing, galaxies and waterlilies

embedded in our hydra-headed starmud

like a blue moon inseparable from

the dark waters of life it blossoms in.

A nightbird shrieks. A ghost kicked up

by the dust of the Milky Way in my wake

weeps like a sad loveletter that’s taken the words

right out of my mouth like an empty mailbox

standing at the side of the road, listening

when there’s nothing, not even an echo,

a whisper of my own innermost voice,

to the silence that lingers in the woods

for asylum from the intimacy that has

forsaken it, and the love in its heart

that trues it like an arrow fletched by the light

to a rapturous wound that hasn’t,

as the fish at both ends of the equinox

jump back like bulls-eyes into the targets

they made of their exits from one medium

to hit in the next like the tree rings

of the grand entrances we make on our way out.

Love perishes like apple bloom in the spring

to be born again among the windfalls of autumn,

the burning bridges of the maple trees

between the fountains on the moon, with birds,

and the housewells we dig like graves

here on earth, to drink our own tears from

like sacred syllables pouring through

the open floodgates of the moonrise

like a prophetic skull trying to hit

all the oracular high notes of the shrill treefrogs

celebrating the dark abundance, bright vacancy

of our corporeal entrances and disembodied exits.

PATRICK WHITE